It was plain in these days that we were nearing a most critical decision, and Nationalist opinion was profoundly uneasy.  Many men were drifting back to Redmond’s view, and recoiled from the prospect of dividing the Convention once more into its original component parts—­Nationalists on the one side, Unionists on the other.  It was proposed that on the Wednesday Nationalists should meet and, if possible, concert joint action; if not, determine definitely each to go our own ways; for a painful part of the situation was that all of us had been used to act together, and none now felt himself free of some obligation.  This had to be cleared up When we came down to Trinity College that morning, the news met us that Redmond was dead.

The Convention adjourned its work, although time pressed most seriously, till after the interment.  Ireland is a country where a public man can always count on a good funeral.  The body was brought to Kingstown, and thence by special train to Wexford, where he had expressed the wish to be laid, in the burying-place of his own people and in the town with which he had been most closely associated.  Hundreds of men came from distant parts to mark their sorrow and respect:  what remained of him was carried in long and imposing procession through the streets.  Over the grave Mr. Dillon, who had been chosen to succeed him in the chair of the Irish party, spoke eloquent and fitting words.  Some day, no doubt, a monument to his memory will be set up in the streets of Wexford, where his great uncle’s statue stands, and where will be placed the memorial to his gallant brother, subscribed for from all parts of the kingdom and from all Irish regiments in the Army.

But I say without hesitation that the first and most striking endeavour to put in lasting shape a tribute to John Redmond was made in the Convention, not by great men, but by the ordinary rank and file of Irish Nationalists, who went back from the graveside to the work which his death had interrupted.

Those who had been inclined before to accept his advice—­still standing on our minutes—­were now more than ever determined to follow it.  That advice was not to refuse the hand of friendship which offered itself from men who by alliance with us could take away from the Home Rule demand all sectarian character:  who could bring for the first time a great and representative body of Irish landlord opinion and Irish Protestant opinion into line with the opinion of Irish tenants and Irish Catholics.  In order to act upon this advice men needed to face a powerful combination of forces and much threatened unpopularity:  they had to encounter the hostility of an able and vindictively conducted newspaper; they had to separate themselves politically from the united voice of their own hierarchy; they had to break away from the politician who for many years now had equalled Redmond in his influence in Ireland and surpassed him in popularity.  All of them were representative of constituents, all were living among those whom they represented; not a man of them but knew he would worsen his personal and political position by what he did.  Yet, for that is the true way to state it, they stood to their dead leader’s policy.